Is This the Perfect New York Bar?

Joan Didion put it this way: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We’re doing it all the time. Storytelling, like dreaming, is a trick for enduring real life, especially when life falls short of our expectations. Sometimes a place — a restaurant, a bookshop, a bar — pulls us through the front door because it acts as a sort of cinematic backdrop for narrative therapy. You walk in, you sit down, you’re transported to a different sphere and a different self. For me, a great bar is the opposite of Cheers, the fictional ‘80s saloon where “everybody knows your name.” A great bar gives you life because it lets you pretend you’re someone else for a little while.

To step into Bar Pisellino, which occupies a prominent corner of New York City’s West Village, is to pass through a portal and find yourself in Italy, or at least a Broadway stage dressed to feel like Italy. There’s a story behind every inch of the place. Rita Sodi and Jody Williams, the partners in commerce and love who own Bar Pisellino, are known for bringing an art director’s eye to neighborhood spots like Via Carota, I Sodi, and Buvette. From the standpoint of storytelling, Bar Pisellino just might represent their apotheosis.

Take a look at the menu — or, more precisely, the listino prezzi. (Take it home, too, and mail it to someone you love; it doubles as a postcard.) Salatini and tramezzini, spremuta and gassosa, cornetti and pinguini — you’ll find nearly zero English here. (Nor on the doilies — yes, there are doilies, but the words on these doilies happen to be Italian erotic slang.)

This is intentional, of course. “How are you going to translate bomboloni?” Jody Williams says. “Come on, who needs to translate that stuff now? It robs you of the experience.” That experience, as Williams can tell you, comes back to “capturing the art of drinking Italian-style — from espresso to aperitivo to cocktails — and all the bites that go along with it.” Italy overflows with all-day hangouts that operate at a range of velocities, from speedy to glacial. Maybe you want to hide in the back and take an extra breath over a cappuccino in the morning, or stand on your feet and dash through a fortifying hot shot of espresso in the afternoon, or lose yourself in hours of conversation over martinis and negronis at night, extending the bender with plate after plate of curried egg salad sandwiches and cacio e pepe potato chips and plush buns stuffed with mortadella (gift-wrapped in brown paper as if they were husk cherries).

If you ask me, the ideal time for Bar Pisellino is the slowest time of all: late afternoon, as the old clock on the wall approaches 4 p.m., on a weekday when you just can’t tolerate one more Zoom meeting. In this oxbow of time you can linger and survey the scene. And it’s here, paradoxically — behind wide windows in the pulsing heart of downtown Manhattan — that you can drift away from the pesky dragnets of reality. Who are you, and who do you love, and where do you need to be, and what’s the story you want to tell?

“You know that feeling when you’re in the train station bar and you’re having a drink as fast as you can and you’re worried because you don’t want to miss your train?” Williams says. Well, let yourself miss it. Turn off your phone, put it away, look around. Let Rita and Jody do the overthinking for you. It would be far too sentimental to call Bar Pisellino a “home away from home.” It’s more like the dream you burrow into when staying awake feels like too much to bear.